Ti

This little tidbit caught my eye on MMO-Champion yesterday:

Alchemy
Transmute: Titanium no longer has a cooldown!

I thought it was interesting because it should drop the price of titanium ore, titanium bars, titansteel and possibly crafted gear that uses titanium bars. Another thing I think it will do is increase the price of saronite ore and bars. It may also make Transmutation specialization a bit more profitable. On Bleeding Hollow, the price of a stack of saronite ore usually bounces between 15 and 20 gold. Find a reliable miner to smelt your stack of ore that you purchased for 15 gold and your cost per transmuted titanium bar is (1.5g/bar * 8 bars) a whopping 12 gold. I'd say there's room for some profit by selling individual bars to the masses.

I have a feeling Blizzard is doing this because they are going to introduce a few new high end alloys that will be used to craft Icecrown level gear, similar to Felsteel or Hardened Adamantite back in the Burning Crusade. If they do, I'd bet that these alloys will require titanium bars. I've already read that there will be something called Primordial Saronite, but haven't seen any details of how to make or buy it.

For those who have a stockpile of titanium bars, it may be a good idea to start liquidating your stock before 3.3 hits and you end up taking a big loss. I'm not quite sure what will happen to titanium ore. It will most likely take a slight drop in price as miners won't need to buy as much (or any) of it to make titansteel, leaving it to the jewelcrafters, which will most likely keep buying as much as they can to prospect for epic gems and powder to buy jewelcrafting tokens with.

Mountain o' Mounts

When my wife wants a big blue dragon/butterfly crossbreed, well I help her get it. It's been a long and difficult process, but it's finally hers. As of October 11th, 2009, Tamaril of Bleeding Hollow is one of the very few with 101 mounts. It was a combination of time, luck and money to get to 100 mounts.

For those of you who want to try for 100 mounts, here are a few tips. First, make yourself a spreadsheet of every mount available and group them by their source, e.g. purchased with PvP tokens, gold, random drop, etc. Do the Argent Tournament dailies every day. This will get you to exalted with all 5 city factions so you can buy all the faction land mounts and also get you Champion's Seals to buy the Argent mounts. That alone, with the "no rep required" purchasable mounts will get you to 58 mounts.

When you are getting close to 100, be sure to farm the first 4 Anubisath Sentinels in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj for the four Battle Tank mounts. Once my wife got to 96 mounts, she dropped Skinning to power level Tailoring and then Engineering so she could craft the 2 mounts from each profession. You can level one up, craft the mounts, add them to your mount inventory and then drop the profession to level another one. They will still count as mounts in your inventory for the achievement even if you can't actually ride them because you lack the skill in the appropriate profession.

I'm glad it's over so my wife can focus her energies (and mine) on gearing her death knight tank for Icecrown Citadel.

Skipping Content

The guild that I'm in, Aculeus Upon Ordeum, is NOT a "hardcore" progression raiding guild but we do raid on occasion and last spring even managed to do Naxx 25 twice a week on a regular basis. Since then, those who enjoy raiding in the guild (which excludes me for the most part) have suffered from a lack of key members (tanks and healers) and lack of desire to formally organize raids on a weekly basis.

A few days ago, I was part of a heated debate with some members of our guild about raiding and someone mentioned that we can’t skip content and that we should start trying to clear Ulduar. Well, that got me thinking, why the hell not? We’ve already done it by downing Onyxia 10 and many of the better raiders have pugged Trial of the Crusader with no issues. So, why is it important to do all the raids in order? It’s not. I personally would like to skip every raid up to Icecrown Citadel. I’ve never been into WoW lore until Lich King and since the main focus of the expansion is the constant battle against the forces of Arthas, I really could care less about seeing anything except Icecrown. Well, I liked defeating Onyxia, but that’s more because it was a redone Classic WoW raid that drops awesome loot.

So, since the new Icecrown 5 man heroic will drop iLvL 232 loot and badge loot from other heroic 5 mans is ilvl 226, why would anyone even bother with doing Ulduar 10 after patch 3.3? Even now for a new 80, the gear you can get from normal Trial of the Champion, heroic badge gear and heroic Trial of the Champion is easily good enough to get started on 10 man Trial of the Crusader and Onyxia. If Gevlon and his old guild could do Ulduar 10 in BLUES, then it should be easily possible to do both of those raids in iLvL 219 and 226 gear. Isn’t that how the progression should be anyway if you were to only do 10 man raids? At this point, the only real reason anyone should have for doing Ulduar 10 is because they want to, not because they have to.

To me, Ulduar and to a certain extent Trial of the Crusader are just side stories to the main conflict in Lich King. Since Blizzard is making it possible to “skip to the good part” of the story, why bother with the side plot if you don’t care to see it?

Small business loans

A few posts back, I mentioned a broke guildie who had plenty of crafting professions but no cash. Since then, I’ve only really managed to do one mining trip of 1 hour to see how much I could gather and I forgot to write down what I did gather. So much for good note taking. I’ll be continuing that experiment this weekend, but I do have an update on the broke guildie. Since I have more than enough money to buy gems/enchants/repairs, I decided to take a risk and send all the materials to craft 10 eternal belt buckles to our financially challenged guild mate. I normally wouldn’t do something like that, but I had a lot of confidence in his ability to take the small loan of materials and turn it into something productive. This small business loan seemed to have worked, because he not only paid me back for my materials, he managed to turn it into 1600 gold in his pocket in the span of ONE WEEK. That’s right, in one week he was able to take his crafting profession and make enough gold for him to pay for repairs and gem/enchant his gear upgrades. This was done without farming for materials or grinding dailies. He would post a few items on the auction house, go do a battleground or heroic and come back and post a few more if he had a few sales. Now that he has some cash in his pockets, he can start branching out into his other crafting professions and grow his business.

To all you out there who are scratching your heads as to how to make money without spending hours and hours grinding for materials or doing dailies, try this:

Find a Goblin and present him or her with a business plan on how you can take a small starter loan of materials and turn it into a crafting business.

The benefits of farming

So, it's been tough lately to get some quality mining time in so I can get accurate numbers for my mining experiment. Between leveling my hunter alt (the most fun I've ever had leveling a character), raiding and helping the guild with brewfest stuff, I haven't had an uninterrupted hour of farming time. A side note, I was part of the first successful AUO 10 man Onyxia raid on Saturday and it felt gooood. We got her on the 7th attempt. She truely is a loot pinata, dropping about 5 or 6 items (I can't remember exactly) which is awesome for a 10 man raid. I won the spellpower sword because I was the only one that could use it. I love winning loot by default! I don't need no stinking /roll.

On to the heart of the subject here. Mining does have it's benefits. I was doing a few laps around Icecrown and decided to head into Sholozar Basin. I had hit 3 titanium nodes in less than 10 minutes and was feeling lucky. I normally head into the Basin and turn left, flying clockwise mining as I go. I decided this time to turn right and go counter clockwise. Good thing I did. As I land to mine a saronite node, I notice the star on my mini map marking one of the spawn points of Loque'nahak, the spirit beast. My wife's hunter has all 3 spirit beasts, so I normally don't pay much attention to these spots any more, but this time I decided to take a look behind me after I mined the ore. Sure enough Loque was there! I quickly did a /gchat shout out for all hunters interested to head to my location asap. Darallun (of afkautoshot) quickly replied and hauled ass out to Sholozar. Luckily, no one else showed up and he had an easy time taming the beast. So now, Darallun has his second spirit beast! It was like the stars had all aligned that night. Darallun usually raids as Survival, but I think he needs to start going Beast Master and bringing out his new kitteh.

So, as we can see, sometimes farming has benefits that transcend the accumulation of gold.

Gone farming

It's been a sad few weeks for me. The wild price variations on crafted ammo has all but wrecked my income generation for a while now and sales of everything else I do have also been sporadic at best, so I'm going to run a short experiment over the next week or two. I'm going to start farming again. I'll be fishing and mining in 1 hour increments to see how much I can gather and convert into gold.

Farming is an important activity because in order to fund just about any tradeskill that you want to use for profit, you need a bankroll to buy materials. Yes, it is true, you need to have money to make money. Well, I'd like to amend that old cliche. You need to have money in order for your money to make money for you.

This experiment was really spurred on by a guildmate who is just about broke (in game). He has all these fancy professions on his two level 80's, but no cash to buy materials. So, I want to try to put a number on how much time it should take someone with a few basic gathering professions to get enough capital to start a crafting business.

Let the experiment begin!

More on inscription

I had a lot of comments on my last post regarding Inscription, so I figured I'd follow up with a new post instead of posting a reply that would get lost or not seen.

For the power leveling question, I'd say it's up to you if you want to wait and do it all at once. I know it's how power leveling professions has been done for years, but it does miss the point of my last article.

The main point of my article was that Inscription is a great profession to level while you level your character because it is useful. If you wanted Engineering as a profession, I'd say wait until you hit level 70 at the very least and power level like crazy. It would give you more time to bargain hunt on the auction house for materials as a side benefit. Engineering has very little benefit to a leveling character, so why bother taking time away from questing?

Inscription is a great profession and it was designed well. The money making part of it is great, but if I wanted to play a game to just make money, I'd be a day trader in real life and not waste my time on making fake money in a game. I play games to have fun and Inscription helps in that regard a lot. I use it while I'm leveling. It helps enhance my character's performance, if you know what I mean ;)

So, in my opinion, if you have a low level alt and want to take up Inscription, start to level it now. I think you'll really enjoy it.

If you did chose to power level Inscription, I'd say just buy the herbs from the auction house, unless they are grossly overpriced or in short supply. You can also buy Ink of the Sea (if it's cheaper than the herbs) and trade it to Jessica Sellers for the inks you need for leveling. For advice on what addons to use, I'd say check out the Greedy Goblin's articles on inscription or Just My Two Copper's forums.